There was a nationwide outage after the national electricity grid crashed to zero following its loss of 1,100 megawatts, MW, from a 3,700MW peak generation earlier.
A grid operations report showed that as of Monday, March 14, 2022, the system was yet to pick up load as just three Generation Companies (GenCos) were trying to restart but yet to generate any energy as of 1pm, Daily Trust reports.
According to the grid operation trend, of the active 25 GenCos on the grid, 19 of them were producing power as of 6am when the grid had 3,867.60MW but that began to reduce gradually until it dropped to 2,761.20MW by 10am after six GenCos went down, leaving just 13 GenCos.
At least 1,100MW was lost from the 3867MW peak generation when the five GenCos shut down.
The analysis shows the affected plants to include Azura-Edo IPP (Gas) which was generating 447MW earlier. Shiroro hydropower which had 300MW earlier went off; Trans-Amadi (Gas) lost 92MW; Alaoji NIPP (Gas) lost 75MW; Ihovbor NIPP (Gas) also lost 101MW.
The situation was occurring less than a day after the GenCos through the Association of Power Generation Companies, APGC, raised the alarm over inefficient grid management and accruing debt in the electricity market.
They said some of the GenCos’ turbines now have technical faults due to the inefficiency while the debts have limited their ability to pay for more gas-to-power.
The management of the Transmission Company of Nigeria, TCN, which manages the power grid was yet to comment on the immediate cause of the collapse, being the first of such this year.
A management official promised to revert, saying the company was restoring the grid at the moment.
